What we’ve been up to, Spring 2013

Oftentimes it’s hard to know what other teams are working on and easy to miss interesting developments that get released without a big launch. With that in mind, we thought an occasional series of updates about things we’ve been working on might be of interest.

Festival of Ideas

One of the biggest things we worked on throughout May was the 2013 Festival of Ideas website, including listings and ticket bookings (via EventBrite) for over 150 events.

 

History of the University - a timeline

Built as part of our 50th Anniversary site, our interactive timeline of the University’s history features well over 100 entries, with videos and imagery to help tell the story.

Food and drink on the web

We’ve started a project working with Commercial Services to move catering and bars information into the Web CMS. There’s not much to see just yet, but work is underway to create a dedicated section of the website for catering and drinking outlets on campus, which should be coming soon.

Updating the campus map

The campus map page now has more location pins available, including a dedicated section for venues being used for Festival of Ideas events, in order to help those who may not be familiar with the University to find their way around.

Also pretty cool, but not one we can take the credit for (that belongs with IT Services and Estates), is internal mapping of campus buildings starting to roll out on Google Maps. If you zoom in close, internal mapping information for most buildings on campus is starting to appear. It’s early days, for both us and Google (they’re using us as a pilot for universities in the UK), so we’re not shouting about it yet but this should be really handy once everything’s in place.

York Research Database and the University search engine

We launched the York Research Database back in February, but it took us another couple of months to test and integrate results into our main University search engine, but they’re there now. The big challenge was not indexing too many pages - the research database contains such a vast amount of data that indexing all of it would have overwhelmed the search engine.

Foursquare

We’ve done a small piece of work to establish ourselves on Foursquare. After taking ownership of all our locations a few months ago, we’ve been updating them with accurate information, up to date imagery and links to additional resources.

Updated Twitter widgets

Twitter are in the process of retiring their v1 API, which meant that that our custom Twitter widget available in the Web CMS was about to stop working. We've updated the template to now use the updated standard Twitter widget and it’s working well.

Improving our YouTube channel and notes on video

If you’ve been following our YouTube channel you may have noticed that some of our videos now have a unified thumbnail scheme. This helps in maintaining a brand identity across the institution - we’ve used departmental colours on the bands across the thumbnails in order to better fit them in. We’ve also been doing something of a spring clean on the channel, deleting some old playlists and updating others.

The featured playlist is now a focus on our History Project, including a new series of oral history videos. If you’re interested in a more multimedia-based history of the University there’s some really interesting content here.

We also added some new tips on producing video for the web which are well worth a read if you’re considering adding video content to your site.

Welcome pages

The undergraduate welcome pages will be seeing a big overhaul for the 2013 intake of students. As well as cutting down on the number of pages, we’ve redesigned them to mesh more closely with the welcome booklet sent out to all new students. The pages will be going live in July, in time to help a whole new generation of students settle in at York.

Website redesign

In more behind-the-scenes news, we’ve been doing a lot of work on preparing for a big website redesign. If you’ve had a look at our 50th site you’ll have already seen an idea of what it’s going to look like, but there’s still a lot more to come!

Building the York Research Database

Today we launched the brand new York Research Database to the public. This is a web view of all York's research activity, as stored in Atira's Pure, the University's CRIS (Current Research Information System). It's been a long time in gestation while the data has been cleaned and updated, but I think it's been worth the wait.

Encouraging discovery

Initially the Web Office's involvement was just to help skin the public view of the data that shipped with the product. We did that, but something felt lacking - if you knew what you wanted then you would find it, but then what? We wanted people to explore and discover the breadth and depth of the research going on at York, and our first implementation didn't quite nail that.

We worked closely with our local Pure project team and the team at Atira to build features that would encourage a deeper dive into the data. Development work was being handled by Atira so we went through several rounds of generating ideas, building mockups and then liaising with them about implementation. It was a great process, covering everything from adding big features to me being very pedantic about micro-copy in the pages, and the whole team at Atira were brilliant throughout.

Eureka

I confess I was sceptical when I first looked at web views of research data, both York's and at other Universities; they never really held my interest. My 'eureka' moment with our system came when I was testing the latest iteration of our work with Atira one day and realised I'd stopped testing and was just browsing computer science research. If the system could distract me from nitpicking about the design and features, I was confident it would encourage others to dig deeper too.

Features to help exploration

A few of the things we added to the vanilla product which I think make a big difference:

• 'Refine your results' links, with indicators to show how many results you'll get with that refinement applied, on search results pages. These just apply advanced search filters, but make them much more visible and easier to toggle on and off.
• 'By the same authors' and 'From the same journal' sidebars on publications pages. These are great for following a trail of related content.
• 'Recently viewed' links in the footer of every page. Each record in the database that you look at during a visit to the site stacks up in a series of lists in the footer of every page so that you can easily get back to the things you've seen already.

Links from staff profiles and department pages

Now that the York Research Database is live, we've enabled a field in the staff profile template in the CMS to make it easy to link to your profile page. There are more details on the Pure web pages for staff, including images to use to make links from departmental research pages and elsewhere too.

Measuring success

I'll be poring over Google Analytics in weeks to come to see whether we've managed to make the site as engaging as I hoped. You can let us know what you think in the comments, by tweeting us @uoywebteam or by emailing me direct at dan.wiggle@york.ac.uk.